Tropical update: Major hurricane heads toward Bermuda

Humberto is a major hurricane headed toward Bermuda, Imelda is drenching East Texas with heavy rain and Jerry is set to become a hurricane by Friday morning.

Humberto is a category 3 hurricane headed toward Bermuda.

Hurricane Humberto is situated 285 miles west of Bermuda, moving east/northeast at 16 mph. Maximum sustained wind is 115 mph; hurricane warnings are in effect for Bermuda.

The forecast track takes the center of Humberto just to north of the island later tonight, but it is a large hurricane. Hurricane force winds extend 60 miles out from the center of the storm; tropical storm winds extend 175 miles out.

Once it passes Bermuda, the storm will turn more to the north tomorrow and begin to weaken.

Imelda is an ambitious storm. It went from a tropical wave to a tropical depression to a tropical storm (as they are classified) in less than 2 hours as it made landfall around Freeport, Texas (a little south of Galveston) Tuesday afternoon. Maximum sustained wind is down to 30 mph, but the big threat by far is the rain that will come out of it.

The fear with storms like these is that they can sit and spin; Tropical Storm Allison came ashore on the upper Texas coast and hammered Houston with over 3 feet of rain. Allison remains the only retired name that was not a hurricane.

6 to as much as 18" of rain is forecast to fall over eastern Texas from Galveston to Houston, into western Louisiana through Thursday. Rainfall rates may be as high as 3" per hour, which is intense for lake effect snow...nearly unimaginable for rain.

Tropical Storm Jerry is just getting started. It currently has estimated wind of 45 mph as it moves west/northwest at 13 mph; the forecast is for it to pick up speed in the coming days.

The northern Leeward Islands (Anguilla, Antigua, St. Kitts) are forecast to deal with Jerry as a category 1 hurricane (75 mph wind) late tomorrow into early Friday.

The forecast is for Jerry to curve to the north before it reaches the Bahamas and to move northwest from there. The so-called spaghetti plots, which is a compilation of models overlayed on a map, have Jerry staying well offshore of the East Coast.